Thursday, August 14, 2014

Bearded Gits Are The Real Heroes

For those who were planning on building statues in honor of Wesley Lowrey and Ryan Reilly, PoliticHo's wingnut blogger Dyldo Byers demands that you slow your roll:

Ferguson is not Falluja, and Wesley Lowery and Ryan Reilly aren't heroes. They're two reporters who happened to be in the right place at the wrong time. The sooner this story returns to the death of Michael Brown, the standoff between the protesters and the police, and the issue of accountability and justice, the better.

But no one I've read has called the two reporters heroes; nor can I find such accolades via Google. The best Dyldo can do is find quotes from Lowery's WaPo colleagues praising his work, not calling him a hero. Nor has any outlet I'm aware of stopped covering the death of Brown to focus on the illegal arrests.

And "the" story isn't just about Mr. Brown's death. There's the story of Brown's alleged murder, and there's the separate story about the local police running roughshod over the rights of Ferguson's remaining citizens, including through the attempted silencing of reporters bearing witness to those actions. Lack of accountability and injustice aen't limited to Mr. Brown, and holding Brown's killer(s) accountable won't end the injustice for Ferguson's citizens. Given his political bent, it's no surprise that Dyldo wants to focus on a single event rather than a corrupt and bigoted system that can't be excused as the actions of one bad apple.

Messrs. Lowery and Reilly aren't in a war zone, but they exposed themselves to potentially lethal chemicals and a heavily-armed police department with blood on its hands in order to do their jobs. And that's a far sight more heroic than blogging with one's pants around one's ankles while waiting to paraphrase Fox News's latest press release. My guess is that had Dyldo ever done any real reporting in his career, he would've confessed to anything -- and evacuated his bowels -- the minute a police officer looked in his direction.

What's really tragic about Byers is that he's actually happy with the results of his "article." His objective is not to inform, or even to inflame. It is to get people to look at him, talk about him, notice him.

The problem stems from the fact that Byers doesn't know the difference between people pointing at him and talking because he just did something extraordinary, and people talking and pointing because he just dropped his pants in public.